Bruce Cockburn reflects on his career during CSHF plaque ceremony at Studio Bell, home of National Music Centre

Bruce Cockburn presented a plaque to honour his induction into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame on Sunday at Studio Bell, home of the National Music Centre. DARREN MAKOWICHUK/Postmedia

January 22, 2018 – Bruce Cockburn is not in the habit of listening to his old songs. But he did find a unique way to review his canon of music a few years back.

It was when he drove his daughter to preschool in San Francisco. He became his own captive audience.

“She would always insist on hearing my stuff in the car,” said Cockburn, talking to media on Sunday evening at Studio Bell, home of the National Music Centre. “‘Can we put on your music in the car?’ Every day this would repeat itself. ‘Do we have to? Can I not play somebody else?’ Nope. So I’d play me. It’s like looking at an album of snapshots in a way. It brings back all the feelings. Not all of the details, some of those are lost to the murk of time. But, certainly, that brings back the feelings that went into those songs.”

Cockburn was in a bit of a reflective mood Sunday evening at the National Music Centre, where he participated in the plaque ceremony held in honour of his 2017 induction into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. It found him placing his plaque on the wall, which already holds the names of artists such as Leonard Cohen, Hank Snow, Joni Mitchell and Wilf Carter.

Now housed at the National Music Centre alongside the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame, the organization is overseen by the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN). The honour seems long overdue. Somehow SOCAN managed to find more than 50 songsmiths to induct before honouring Cockburn — a songwriter’s songwriter who wrote If I Had a Rocket Launcher and Lovers in a Dangerous Time — this year, alongside Neil Young, Beau Dommage and Stéphane Venne.

But he was gracious and had high praise for his fellow songwriters from the Great White North.

“I think Canada punches well above its weight in terms of the quality of songwriting that comes out of this country relative to the size of the population,” said Cockburn, who will play the Jack Singer Concert Hall on Tuesday night. “When you think how much we were influenced by English pop music in the ’60s and American pop music forever, there’s a lot of American pop music that is actually Canadian. And a lot of it that is not pop but has more serious intent than what often gets called pop music comes from here and I’m proud of that.”

Cockburn, 72, recounted his beginnings as a songwriter. Initially, the Ottawa native saw himself becoming a composer for jazz ensembles. But he also became interested in poetry.

“Then, along came Gordon Lightfoot, Ian and Sylvia Tyson, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Bob Dylan and others who woke me up to the notion that interesting music and poetics were not mutually exclusive, that you could put serious music together with melody, a chant or a groove,” he said. “I was hooked.”

Wearing a tie and his trademark Doc Martens, Cockburn also showed a flash of the political irreverence that informs many of his most beloved songs when talking about Canada versus the U.S., where he has lived for the past nine years.

“As people who belong to this country, we should know that we belong to the one island of sanity in the Western Hemisphere,” he said to cheers from the audience. “Everything south of here is (expletive) up.”